Ahmadinejad gets an earful in Egypt

CAIRO President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's three-day trip to Egypt, the first in three decades by an Iranian leader, started pleasantly enough Tuesday.

Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi greeted Ahmadinejad with a smile during a red-carpet ceremony at a Cairo airport. The two talked about the crisis in Syria and how to improve the relationship between their own countries, which has been in a freeze since after the Iranian revolution in 1979.

“Egypt is a very important country in the region and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes it is one of the heavyweights in the Middle East,” Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran's state-run Islamic Republic News Agency. “We are ready to further strengthen ties.”

Then things got testy.

During an afternoon visit to Al-Azhar mosque and university, Egypt's seat of Sunni scholarship, Ahmadinejad was upbraided at a news conference by his hosts, who accused Shiites of interfering in Arab countries, including Egypt and Bahrain, and of discriminating against Sunnis in Shiite-majority Iran.

As a spokesman for Al-Azhar scolded his guest using sectarian language, an aide to Ahmadinejad cut in.

“We didn't agree on this,” he said, as the Iranian leader nodded and replied: “We agreed on unity, brotherhood.”

After the news conference, a protester tried to hit Ahmadinejad with a shoe, according to video of the confrontation by Turkey's Anatolia news agency, which said the assailant was a Syrian, presumably angered at Iran's alliance with Syria's president, Bashar Assad.

Four people were later arrested for attacking the Iranian leader's motorcade, according to the website of Al Ahram, Egypt's state-owned newspaper.

That aside, relations have warmed since the toppling of Egypt's former president, Hosni Mubarak, who was hostile to Iran's leadership and portrayed himself to the United States and its allies, as a bulwark against Iranian influence.

The relationship had atrophied over decades, damaged in particular by Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat's granting of asylum to the deposed shah, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, who was given a state funeral in Cairo in 1980. When Sadat was assassinated a year later, Iran named a street after his killer, Khaled Islambouli.

Morsi, an Islamist and Egypt's first elected leader, promised a new direction that he said would be more independent than his predecessors. Extending a hand to Iran was seen as part of an effort to improve ties with regional powers and, more important, to broker a solution to the war in Syria.

Iranian officials were even more eager to mend the relationship, speaking of Egypt and Iran as the core of an axis of regional powers.